Viruses & Malware

An emerging breed of computer virus that keeps hackers informed about the latest weaknesses in computer networks has been discovered by security experts.

The viruses infect a computer network, scan for security vulnerabilities and then report back to hackers through an internet chatroom.

Armies of computers infected with "bot" viruses are routinely controlled via a chatroom connection. Typically these machines are used to knock a website offline with a "denial of service attack" or as a conduit for sending out spam email.

According to anti-virus firm Trend Micro, the number of Linux viruses in the wild has not changed dramatically for two years, but its figure of 500 dangerous and exploitative programs dashing around the Internet seeking unprotected systems is cause for concern, until you look closer at the reasoning.

Rainer Link, assistant to head of the company's EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) Operations, admits the figures can be misleading and says it refers to Linux malware in general, including malware running on Linux whose ultimate target is Windows.

Gartner research says "Warhol Worms" and four other topics comprise the five most overhyped security threats today.

The research firm isn't trying to suggest your database server will suddenly start throwing images of Campbell Soup cans up to users instead of product images from your catalog.

Instead, a "Warhol Worm" would infect every single machine on the Internet in fifteen minutes, bringing ecommerce and VPN communications to a halt. That hasn't happened yet, though some viruses have had a great impact worldwide.

A new Trojan horse is attempting to lure in rugby fans with the promise of a lion singing happy birthday.

This summer sees the British and Irish Lions rugby union team tour New Zealand and, according to security experts, a happy lion is currently attempting to infiltrate our Inboxes.

If your IM buddy is sending you a photo link through AOL Instant Messenger, you better check with them to make sure they really sent it. A new worm is spreading through AIM using spoofed addresses.

Anti-virus experts at Sophos have discovered the first piece of malware to attack Microsoft's new anti-spyware product, currently still in beta.

The Troj/BankAsh-A Trojan horse is designed to steal passwords and online banking passwords from unsuspecting Windows users. The Trojan horse also disables Microsoft AntiSpyware, currently available only as a beta download from Microsoft's website, attempting to suppress warning messages that Microsoft AntiSpyware may display and deleting all files within the program's folder.

Another variant of the Mytob worm began wiggling its way into inboxes this week, enticing recipients to open an e-mail attachment that could allow a remote hacker to access and perform commands on an infected machine.

The return of Sober (variant N) has seen it rocket to the top of the current threat list, heading the chart of most prolific viruses during the past month.

IT managers in their daily firefight against viruses saw a massive spike in the instances of Sober-N as it displaced Zafi-D atop the 'least wanted' list provided by antivirus firm Sophos.

Sven Jaschan, the presumed author of the Sasser worm, will appear before a court starting with July 5. The 19-year-old young man has been captured by the authorities following the placement of a bounty on his head by Microsoft, the 250,000 dollars being enough of an incentive to determine Sven’s “pals” to turn him over. Released on bail, Sven has been contacted by the Securepoint, a company that showed a great interest in his programming skills, and was made an offer for employment.

As of May 30, 2005, TrendLabs has declared a Medium Risk Virus Alert to control the spread of WORM_MYTOB.AR. TrendLabs has received several infection reports indicating that this malware is spreading in Australia, China, Hongkong, India, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Taiwan, United States.

Like other WORM_MYTOB variants, this memory-resident worm propagates by sending a copy of itself as an attachment (file size is around 29,868 to 29,882 bytes) to an email message, which it sends to target recipients using its own Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) engine.